Rust Against Humanity

A small web replica of the party game Cards Against Humanity. It’s mainly a learning project, to try and build a full-stack web app in Rust. The backend is based on warp, and the front-end is made with Yew. The two communicate via web sockets.

It’s been a fun project to make, but my general conclusion is that Yew is not a good framework for making games—it’s really designed for web apps. Baking web socket support back into it was a hassle, and I haven’t figured out nice ways to handle game scenes or to render animations.

I haven’t tested it online, but it works well on my local network. The game is extremely rough on the edges, but all the essential features are here: you can join a game, select cards, play them, vote for an answer, and the score is tracked. What’s missing is stuff like end-game, keeping sessions between reload, instant messaging, and a good deal of design polish.

One of my favourite aspects of making a card game in Rust is that you can leverage the borrow checker to ensure that a card is never duplicated. The deck owns all its cards, and when a player draws one, ownership is transferred to the player’s hand. After being played, a card is transferred to the discard pile. With true linear types, we could further ensure that cards are never deleted, but afaik there’s no way to support this at compile-time.

Another fun part of this project was writing the cards. Many of them were taken directly from the original board game, but Mandooks and I spent part of an evening coming up with original ones, mostly based on our friend group’s inside jokes and references. This made testing the game extremely funny.

As always, source code is available on GitHub.